Page 1426 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 11 May 1994
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Let us look at fact three. According to the FAC submission, upgrading Canberra Airport to accommodate B747 aircraft would cost $25m, excluding the terminal. In fact, according to the FAC submission, a totally new facility including combined domestic and international terminals, and upgrading all the services, such as the runways, would cost $57.5m. Let us look at it. Here we are talking about a once only capital cost which can be written off over a number of years. Compare this with the subsidy that this Government gives every year to ACTION buses, which is written off each and every year. If you compare the economic benefits of the two propositions, I know which one I would take.
What we need, Mr Deputy Speaker, is a government with a bit of courage, the courage of its conviction that Canberra is the capital of Australia and has very little commercial infrastructure on which the economy depends. What we need is the political willpower to proceed to develop our most important industry, and that is tourism. Tourism is Canberra's most important commercial source of income - income which equals jobs, especially for our youth. Canberra gets only a very small proportion of the international visitors - some 200,000-plus per annum out of the total of some three million, according to the Canberra Times of 13 January. I quote from the Federal Government's white paper of last week, under the heading "Tourism - Industry Profile":
... the real growth potential lies with inbound tourism which is expected to grow at an average rate of between 8 and 13 per cent per year.
It is therefore most important that we broaden our base in tourism, and the most important way is to attract international tourism. We know from the ABS publication "Australian Capital Territory in Focus", which deals with the 1991-92 figures and which was issued in 1993, that in 1991 the ACT generated some $47m from international visitors. That came from only about 30,000 international visitors. ATIA and the ACT Tourism Commission estimated that in 1992-93 over 200,000 international visitors contributed some $100m to $120m to the ACT economy. If we could only double that figure of 200,000-plus, Canberra tourism would benefit by a total of some $250m per annum. In my opinion that is not an insignificant sum. This would in itself create jobs for our young people, and this is an area where we are lagging behind the rest of Australia.
Let us hear what the ACT 2000 Committee, under the chairmanship of Jim Service, had to say. I quote:
The experience of Cairns, Queensland, in establishing international facilities and successfully increasing tourism through aggressive marketing, is an indication of the benefits that could be derived for Canberra and the region.
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